[xubuntu-users] Starting services at boot

[Peter Flynn]

On my laptop at home, I have for years been happily printing to the
printer in the next room, which is attached to a desktop (both machines
running Xubuntu 13.04). The CUPS config for the printer was a normal
ipp://192.168.X.Y:631/printers/NAME

Suddenly, printing wasn't available: no application could print to
anything except Print to File -- all other entries were missing from the
list of printers.

Easy to see why: for some unknown reason, CUPS was no longer starting up
at boot time. Manually using sudo service cups start allowed me to see
the installed printers in the Settings Manager > Printers applet, but
http://localhost:631/... returns a 404 File Not Found for anything
except the port 631 home page.

Examining the config for the printer in Settings Manager > Printers, the
ipp had changed to ipps, and the IP address had changed to
localhost.adam (adam is the name of the machine with the printer
attached, but I don't use a hosts file or local DNS, so the laptop
should never have known this.

I have no idea how this got changed, but editing it back correctly fixed
the immediate problem. Whether it will stay set, or if some bug in CUPS
is going to rewrite it next time I boot, is unclear.

Worse, there seems to be no way to set CUPS to restart at boot time
unless I simply add the command in the old way to /etc/rc.local. The
Settings Manager > Session and Startup applet has an Application
Autostart tab, but this seems to be for user-end applications when you
log in, not for system services.

Has anyone any idea what might have caused CUPS to go AWOL like this?
I'm assuming it was a recent update of something, but the last time
updates popped up I scanned the list as usual before applying them, and
I don't recall seeing anything in there that looked unusual.

Any why would CUPS's web interface become unavailable, even when CUPS is
running?

Very weird. THIS is exactly the kind of instability and impenetrability
we were discussing the other day, that gives Linux a bad name among new
users. In Windows, you expect this kind of rubbish. Linux should be better.

///Peter